Data packets are transmitted within a network system, such as a Fibre Channel network. To prevent a recipient device (e.g., a storage server) from being overwhelmed with incoming data packets, many network systems provide flow control mechanisms based on, for example, a system of buffer-to-buffer credits. Each buffer-to-buffer credit represents the ability of a recipient device to accept additional data packets. If a recipient device issues no credits to the sender, the sender cannot send any additional data packet. This control of the data packet flows based on buffer-to-buffer credits helps prevent the loss of data packets and also reduces the frequency of need of data packets to be retransmitted across the network system. It should be appreciated that switches that connect various network segments in the network system buffer all incoming data packets. In particular, data packets from input queue are transferred to egress queue through a loss arbitration system. When a recipient apparatus is slow, this egress queue becomes full, which can result in the ingress queue becoming full too. Such data packets consume all buffer-to-buffer credits causing blocking of flows destined to other recipient apparatuses.